There are days when it sucks being responsible for smaller life forms.

Like when you notice a fish floating at the top of your fish tank because you may have not cleaned the water recently.

That totally sucks. No one likes a fish killer.

Or when your dog starts pushing around his food bowl with his nose only for you to realize you forgot to buy dog food. Again. And no matter how many times you pour Cheerios in his bowl, he still gives you the side eye and accuses you of being a bad doggy momma with his hound dog expression.

That sucks.

It sometimes feels like I am barely responsible enough to wear adult sized pants let alone be in charge of a family of smalls and various assorted non-humanoid life.

They just keep demanding more and more from me. Like food. And toilet paper. I can hardly keep up.

Which is why I was happy to escape my house on Friday and Saturday to take the girl child to a volleyball tournament. The dogs where barking, Jumbster was grouchy and Frac had been sick since Wednesday night breathing his toxic germs all over the place.

Frac wasn't feeling well. But after several days of listening to him moan and bitch about feeling like crap I was happy to escape for a few hours to go sit in a hard plastic chair inside a smelly gymnasium and watch a bunch of teenaged girls hit a volleyball.

As a mother with severely disabled children who have real medical problems, I have absolutely no patience for the pathetic sniffles of my healthy children.

Which is why, on Sunday morning when my eldest son came into my room at 530 in the morning to wake me up to tell me his stomach hurt I told him to suck it up butter cup. I mean really, did he expect me to drag my butt out of bed to pour him some Pepto Bismol?

It was the flu. Drink some fluids, takes some over the counter medication and go to sleep. Or better yet, go talk to your baby brother about what it means to have real medical problems. Sheesh.

At 10 am, Frac was still whining and I was becoming short tempered with him. "Stop whining. I know. Your tummy hurts." It was all I could do to not snarl at him.

It appeared Frac was another victim of the annoying man-cold and rolled my eyes at his male whininess. Seriously. I carried small elephants for almost ten months and then had them claw their way out of my girlie bits and I never whined this much. Boys.

But at noon, I started to listen.

It only took some tears to get my attention. My Frac is many things, over sensitive, a tad lazy and maybe even annoying at times. But he's never a crybaby.

And yet here he was crying.

Finally, my mommy instincts were paying attention.

By one pm, I knew Frac didn't have the flu. By 130, I knew I had to take the poor kid to the emergency room.

An hour and a bit later, he was admitted to hospital.

By 6 pm I was signing permission forms to have my son's abdomen dissected like a frog in a high school biology class.

Frac's last words to me before being wheeled into the operating theatre? "I told you my tummy hurt."

He must have missed the signs that I was drowning in mommy guilt. You know, what with him busy writhing in pain from having his appendix explode inside of him.

(Side note: Did y'all know they supposedly take out an astronaut's appendix before sending them to space? Or that the cow is one of the only mammals that use their appendix? The things one learns inside an emergency room.)

Frac is going to be fine. He's recovering nicely. And he's lording it over my head that he was right and that I was wrong. And I'm never allowed to tell him to 'suck it up' again.

I'm sure that's a promise I'll be able to keep for a few days at least. All bets are off when he is loafing in bed at home, ringing a bell and demanding I wear my mom pants all the time.

It's bad enough I'm going to have to grind my own coffee for the foreseeable future. I don't even want to think about what it's going to be like to have yet another (temporarily) disabled child at home.

I should probably just find new homes for my pets in the mean time.

If history is predictive of the future, the smalls under my care may have a problem.

Sorry kid. You were totally right. Enjoy hearing me admit that now because IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.